The Revival of Bux Sites in AI Terminals: Monetizing Ad Breaks

Many people earned their first money online through "bux" sites — services that paid pennies for watching ads and completing simple tasks. It seemed like that model had long been dead and buried. But in June 2026, the mechanic was revived in a new wrapper — this time inside Claude Code, Cursor, and other AI agents.

In this article, we break down how the new versions of "bux" sites work, how much you can earn, and whether they have a future. 

The Monetization Mechanic Behind AI Agent Pauses

While Claude Code and other agents are processing a user's request, they display templated phrases: "Baking…", "Discombobulating…", "Grep…". Hundreds of thousands of users stare at that line for hours every day. 

On June 11, 2026, Andrew McCallip — an engineer at Varda Space and the creator of several viral tech projects — saw an opportunity in this: a chance to monetize that idle time and build infrastructure around a new product.

He launched Kickbacks.ai — an extension that replaces the Claude Code spinner with text ads and pays users 50% of the revenue. The launch tweet racked up 5.5 million views in 24 hours. Within 48 hours, two direct competitors had appeared.

The mechanic is straightforward: advertisers bid on blocks of 1,000 five-second impressions, with the highest bidder winning the auction. 

According to the developer, users can earn roughly $0.60–$1 per hour of AI usage. One of the first public tests on Hacker News returned these results: 3 hours, 407 impressions, $4.43 in profit.

Independent modeling for a typical four-hour workday projected $21–$36 per month. A Claude Pro subscription costs $20 per month — meaning it's theoretically possible to offset the cost through ad revenue with active Claude usage.

We tested it ourselves: over 3 days, we earned $4.36. As installs grow, impression values will decline — that's standard ad inventory mechanics: more supply, lower CPM. According to Kickbacks.ai's dashboard, the average CPM is currently $2, though it peaked at $1,000 at launch. 

Abusers have surely already considered opening multiple consoles and running parallel queries. It won't work: the platform only recognizes one active console. You can try different terminals and folders, but there are no guarantees. 

At the time of writing, payouts were not yet open — earnings were accumulating on a counter but couldn't be withdrawn. There were no real advertisers either — the visible Firecrawl ad was a platform placeholder designed to generate buzz. However, as of June 25, there are already dozens of advertisers.

Casinos are among the advertisers

Kickbacks essentially created a new niche, and alternatives with different terms and technical approaches emerged almost immediately.

IdleAds.dev — launched on Hacker News on June 12, offers users a 70% revenue share and takes a technically cleaner approach: server-side impression verification, no editor patching.

Idlen.io — an extension for VS Code, Cursor, Windsurf, plus browser extensions for ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini. 70% revenue share. Claims $20–$100 per month. Downside: it reads the project's package.json file for ad targeting — a more significant level of data access.

Success stories are already circulating on X, with users reporting actual payouts for ad views. In the screenshot below, one user earned $77 and received it to their Stripe account. The owner of Kickbacks also announced 1,000 payouts to early testers from 27 countries. 

Risks the Owners Don't Talk About

Kickbacks patches Anthropic's files, continuously weakens the Content Security Policy, and auto-updates every 90 seconds without signature verification — all of which creates potential security risks. In plain terms: users install an extension that modifies a third-party product and pulls updates without any verification. Anthropic does not officially support this and has no affiliation with these services whatsoever.

A safer path is the Idlen SDK or similar APIs that integrate into your own application rather than modifying third-party tools.

But the core issue isn't technical. The entire construct is built on Anthropic's infrastructure — just four months after the company ran Super Bowl ads explicitly saying "advertising is coming to AI." If Anthropic decides to block the extension or shut down the API, the whole business collapses with a single update.

Someone even built a project called AIWaitIndex to compare the platforms. Worth noting separately: there was a controversy around IdleAds — in the Kickbacks thread on one forum, a comment appeared saying "try IdleAds.dev, it pays 70%" from a user whose handle closely resembled the name of IdleAds' founder.

And the cherry on top — advertiser-side tests. One enthusiast spent $35 and received 1,292 unique impressions and 0 clicks. 

Takeaways

The idea is brilliant in its simplicity: there's user attention, a pause, and a blank screen — why not sell that to advertisers. Kickbacks.ai is the first and most viral example, but certainly not the last. 

The concept is still rough around the edges, but it's an indicator of where AI tool monetization is heading. Bux sites are back — they just pay you now not for clicking, but for watching ads while the AI generates a response.